


grounded

by symmetrophobic



Category: iKON (Kpop)
Genre: But also happy things, Canon, Gen, some sad things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-22
Updated: 2015-11-22
Packaged: 2018-05-02 21:26:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5264180
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/symmetrophobic/pseuds/symmetrophobic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hanbin's so going to quarter and burn them and paint his face with their ashes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	grounded

This is all Hanbin’s fault. Really. If he hadn’t ordered them all to pair up and take turns in the studio to try a hand at the composing software, Junhoe might be at home sprawled out on his bed after a really nice hot shower right now. And while being in the same bedroom as the two pronounced geniuses of the group and subsisting under their greatness isn’t exactly ideal (few things ever are in Junhoe’s opinion, to be honest) it certainly beats _this_.

“Try the one on the right,” Yunhyung orders lazily from somewhere behind him, where he’s probably lounging like a hooker on the rather lavish studio couch that Hanbin had gotten as a gift from management, probably to encourage him to spend more sleepless nights doing slave labour here. Yunhyung’s apparently taken it upon himself to bring backseat driving to a whole new level, because he’s watching everything Junhoe’s clicking over his shoulder and criticising freely at opportune moments. Sometimes Junhoe wonders why he even puts up with this.

“Look, why don’t you come here and-…”

“I’m tired~,” Yunhyung whines, and Junhoe can literally hear him kicking around on the sofa, upending cushions and comforters. Brat. “Do it. By order of hyung.”

_Some hyung,_ Junhoe thinks, but clicks the soundtrack anyway. The sound of explosive dissonant music makes them both crack up though, and the music is quickly drowned in the sound of snorting and wheezing.

Both of them have long finished with poking around the application and grasping the ropes of composing (Junhoe has the steam power of an ox when it comes to gritting his teeth and following orders and yeah, maybe Yunhyung’s enthusiasm had helped, _maybe_ ) and had quickly and grudgingly fulfilled the leader’s threatening order to _jolly well compose something before you think about stepping out of here_ (it’s a song about the exotic shape of Hanbin’s nostrils and how he should be less gay with Bobby and Jinhwan-hyung), but it’s an hour till the time Donghyuk and Jinhyung had left the studio the previous night, so they’ve been reduced to lazily mixing tracks and recordings of rude bodily noises while they wait till they’re allowed to go home.

Junhoe had decided to hack into Hanbin’s account about half an hour earlier after a few eons of boredom, and now, after some very planned and concentrated effort on both boys’ parts, they’ve managed to transform most of his half-finished songs into masterpieces.

Junhoe snorts again when he replays the section where he’d replaced the bass drum with a recording of Yunhyung burping into the mike. Somewhere along the way, Yunhyung had very deftly managed to add in the lyrics of Wrecking Ball and Bang Bang to the beat of Hanbin’s latest piano ballad, and Junhoe had set a sound clip of Hanbin screaming about a bug to play on loop in the background.

Hanbin’s so going to quarter and burn them and paint his skin with their ashes.

“Junhoe! Junhoe!” Yunhyung starts giggling again, like he always does when he’s struck with inspiration on yet another way to torture his dongsaengs, as he struggles to get up from the couch. “Put the original tracks in a folder labelled “Jinhwan’s Pants”. Then he’ll have to get _into Jinhwan’s pants_ to save his music, get it?”

“You’re so lame, hyung,” Junhoe scoffs, grinning, but he does it anyway. Yunhyung does a victory dance, seal-clapping as he thumps back down on the sofa, wiggling in joy at the thought of an angry murderous Hanbin.

Junhoe turns around in the swivel chair once he’s done, slumped down with total disregard for the state of his spine, and watches Yunhyung reclining on the lush sofa, looking extremely satisfied with himself.

“You think he’ll get angry, though?” Junhoe considers after a moment, and Yunhyung makes a face.

“Uhm, duh, we kinda just deformed his life’s works,” he laughs, as though the thought makes him happy. “But he’ll get all his tracks back once he finds Jinhwan’s Pants, though, so it’s all good.”

“Huh,” Junhoe’s thinking about chores and how much more of them Hanbin might make them do once he finds out what they’ve done to his songs, but right now, tucked in the safety of the studio with a very content partner-in-crime, he feels invincible (enough to regret it later, anyway) so he doesn’t give it much more thought.

It’s about ten more minutes of being bored out of their minds before Yunhyung worms a little further onto the sofa, stretching out like a cat and smooshing his face into a pretty leopard print cushion.

“Yah,” Junhoe mutters, poking his hyung’s thigh with a toe. “Don’t fall asleep, you’re too heavy to carry home.”

“You’d carry me?” Yunhyung perks up, bright-eyed demeanour resembling an excited kitten by a rather disturbing extent.

“I just said-…”

“ _Ohh_ , I _knew_ you loved me June,” Yunhyung cackles, fly-leaping into Junhoe and nearly tipping them both out of the chair.

“Angh,” Junhoe says, trying to push him off. Some things, like broken swivel chairs, and unlike music soundtracks, can’t be repaired in time to escape the wrath of overstressed leaders, and Junhoe really doesn’t feel like suffering a violent death anytime soon. “-off.”

Yunhyung responds by tumbling off the chair onto his feet, dragging them both backwards onto the couch, and they end up in a mess of tangled limbs and cushions and breathy laughter.

Junhoe, after some difficulty, extricates enough of himself to peel off of Yunhyung, but this action proves to have been done completely in vain when the older boy drags him back down about 0.45 seconds later, before wrapping himself around the grumpy maknae like a delighted octopus.

“Sleep with me,” Yunhyung says brightly, and Junhoe really falls off the couch then.

Yunhyung’s howling with laughter like a hyena and Junhoe’s rubbing the back of his head where it’d hit the coffee table leg and swearing because _damnnit,_ _that really hurt, hyung_ , as he throws his adorable hyung an utterly peeved look, which just amps up the laughter, to the point Yunhyung’s wheezing breathlessly and rolling around on the sofa.

“So _cute_ , June,” Yunhyung coos, reaching down to pinch his cheek, and Junhoe bats his hand away sulkily. “Really, though. We’re wasting our youth here. If we nap here first, we might actually get six hours of sleep tonight! C’mon, all we need to do is set an alarm to wake us up when we can leave!”

Junhoe regards him suspiciously. Damn, a nap does sound tempting when he puts it like that.

“This is Hanbin-hyung’s fault,” he mutters (more convincing himself than anything), as he pushes himself up to go shut down the computer.

“Exactly,” Yunhyung’s already happily arranging comforters and pillows (from the Ghost of Hanbin’s Sleepless Nights Past) to form some semblance of a bed, before thumping down. “Wow, this couch _is_ comfy. Management’s biased as heck.”

“I dunno about that, _we’re_ not the confirmed members, as far as I know,” Junhoe mutters, mouth on autopilot as he closes the programs and erases all evidence of them messing up Hanbin’s tracks. “I’d say they’re just making an investment on whatever’ll give them the most returns.”

He only realises what he’s said when he finally clumsily shut down the Mac, and realises Yunhyung hasn’t said a single thing since.

“Hyung?” Junhoe blinks into the dimness of the studio, eyes adjusting from the brightness of the computer screen. He wonders how Hanbin and Jiwon put up with this on a daily basis.

Yunhyung is curled in the comforter, staring at the ceiling, suddenly looking very small and very lost in the mess of blankets on the giant couch, and Junhoe feels oddly empty looking at that, like the sight of it unbalances whatever tiny bit of stability they’ve all got left here.

“Hyung?” he repeats, and this brings Yunhyung’s wide-eyed gaze over to him, still hollow and wondering and it makes him want to reach out to thin air and grasp the old Yunhyung, the one who makes aegyo faces into the window and guards his lip balm with his life and tapes CDs to the ceiling light, and hold him down with the rest of them before he floats away.

It feels like an eternity passes in the seconds that tick by, silence eased only by the whir of the air-conditioning and the rustle of fabric.

“What’ll happen to us, Junhoe-ah?” Junhoe hates it when Yunhyung speaks softly. That way he can hear the weight of the fear behind every syllable like a ball full of needles, each word driving the ball deeper into his mind.

“Don’t think about it,” blunt replies are all, have been all, that Junhoe’s able to manage, and maybe it’s the lack of sugar coating in his tone, the absence of sympathy and pity and saccharine assurance, that relights something in Yunhyung’s eyes.

Junhoe wonders if Yunhyung understands that he doesn’t feel sorry for him, not after what had happened in the collaboration battle. He wonders if Yunhyung understands that Junhoe doesn’t feel sorry for any of them.

Because Junhoe doesn’t feel sorry for people- he either understands them or he has nothing to do with them. And Junhoe understands Yunhyung.

He understands with every fibre of being what it’s like to fail. He understands what it’s like to lose to someone who’d put in barely a tenth of the effort you did, someone who’d joined the group barely a few months ago. He’s tasted that defeat, spit it out of his mouth and swore to himself that he’d never taste it again.

Junhoe’d learned a year ago, amidst another death battle with another set of brothers in another stupid survival show, that being sorry did little for anyone. Junhoe’d learned that hard work counted for close to nothing without talent, and the same applied vice versa. The heart of the Goo Junhoe had been sandpapered down through the acidity of bitter fangirls’ words and the cold judgement of sunbaes to the bone, to the core, and the time for sympathy was long past.

Junhoe doesn’t pity the people he loves. He grabs them by the wrist and drags them through to the finish line, obstinate, unwavering and merciless. And if they die, he moves on, forgets their names, blinks the imprint of their face away from the inside of his eyelids, because this is the way the world works, and he’s long learned to roll with the punches or be beaten to death.

“Don’t think about it,” he says again, words barely going through his mind before they’re out of his mouth, because that’s the way he operates. That’s the way he’ll live and die. “You’ll go crazy if you think about it. You’re here now. You’re with us. You’ve still got tomorrow and the day after and the day after that to work harder. It’s not over yet.”

Yunhyung lets out a noise that sounds somewhere between a laugh and a sob. This is the point where words fail them, because vocabulary hasn’t been developed to describe something like this yet. This is something expressed through hours of unrelenting dance practice, skipped meals and three hours of sleep, and vocal training to the point they can’t speak.

This is something they both know.

So when Junhoe toes off his shoes and lifts the blanket to crawl under, Yunhyung shifts to accommodate him, both moving perfectly in tandem. It’s as though they’re performing a routine only the two of them know, only this time it’s away from the stage, away from the screams and the prying eyes, and both of them are creating another step of choreography as they go, because they _know_ , they know and they’ve accepted this to be the only way out of it alive.

“Our little June is so wise,” Yunhyung says eventually, after what feels like an eternity of lying huddled under the sheets in the dim light, and though he says it with a degree of sarcasm, Junhoe wonders if that’s sincerity he hears in his hyung’s voice. If he thinks it is, he doesn’t comment. Not now.

“ _Little_ ,” he rolls his eyes instead, curling an arm around Yunhyung’s waist and eliciting a faint giggle.

“No matter what, you’ll always be our grumpy baby June, you know that, don’t you?” Yunhyung snickers, and Junhoe vindictively reaches under the hem of Yunhyung’s shirt to pinch a bit of skin, causing the other boy to squeal, thrashing with laughter under the blanket.

Neither of them remember to set that alarm before they fall asleep minutes later.

*

Junhoe wakes up to the faint sound of giggles and cameras. He jerks awake, worried for a moment that he’d fallen asleep at a practice session or worse, at a fan event.

Then he sees Donghyuk’s giant ugly gleeful face and groans.

Donghyuk skips away once an angry Junhoe reaches out to bat his phone from his hands, holding the device above his head like a prize and doing a victory dance once he’s out of reach, like the brat he is. But then Junhoe notices the entire group of people standing in the doorway and forgets Donghyuk for a second.

Hanbin looks like someone just made him drink a cup of vinegar and it’d gone up his nose, and Jiwon looks amused, if anything. Jinhwan’s a bit further behind them, desperately attempting to shield both Chanwoo’s and Jinhyung’s curious eyes, and he can see the top of Hongseok’s beanie bobbing from behind the general crowd as he tries to tiptoe and ask what’s going on.

Junhoe takes one of the many cushions scattered across the sofa and flings it across the room. It hits Donghyuk square in the face, and the fake maknae squawks indignantly. Jinhyung laughs from behind Jinhwan’s protective hand.

“Both of you. Up. Now,” Hanbin seems to be attempting to avoid cardiac arrest, and Junhoe would laugh if he didn’t remember the octopus currently imprisoning him to the sofa.

He attempts to move- really, he does, and Yunhyung, _damnnit, Yunhyung_ , just tightens his grip around Junhoe, yawning, and he could’ve _sworn_ he’d seen a stupid smug smirk on those lips a second ago.

“Hyung,” he attempts, but all it does is make Yunhyung snuggle closer against his chest, _deliberately, he swears,_ eliciting delighted crows from Donghyuk, more desperate attempts from Jinhwan to protect innocent eyes and the general sounds of asphyxiation from Hanbin.

“I’m leaving, man, this is like straight up voyeurism,” Jiwon raises his hands in mock surrender, sniggering when Junhoe throws him a dirty look, still attempting to peel Yunhyung off him.

“I wanna see-…” Chanwoo whines, and Jinhwan proceeds to attempt to forcibly remove both of them from the room, a notable feat for someone about half a head shorter than all eight of them.

“Stop being happy and _help me_ , you little brat,” Junhoe growls across the room at Donghyuk, who puffs out his chest.

“I am your _hyung_ -…”

“By like _three seconds_ ,” Junhoe scoffs, cutting off Donghyuk’s protest of _two months and-…_ “Now help me get him off.”

Yunhyung finally gives up and sleeping act and starts up recurring whining protests of “No! Don’t wanna!” as Jiwon recruits Hongseok to go over and help bodily remove him from Junhoe, while Donghyuk delightedly documents the entire thing on his phone. It’s only when the sound of the Mac starting up reverberates through the tiny room, as Hanbin checks on his precious computer, that Yunhyung suddenly goes rigid.

Junhoe barely gets a second to relish the hybrid of realisation and horror and fury dawning upon Hanbin’s face (and that’s only because he’s seen all the creative new names that Yunhyung’s given his tracks, wait till he actually hears what they’ve done to them) before Yunhyung springs up from the couch, giggling madly, Junhoe’s hand gripped tightly in his, and Junhoe’s suddenly glad that Donghyuk’s recording this so they can laugh about it later. Everything recedes into a blur as Yunhyung proceeds to drag Junhoe to plow through the wall of surprised boys and tear along down the corridor outside to temporary safety, giggling climbing several octaves as Hanbin’s roar echoes through the building, the entire of Seoul and the Earth.

“SONG YUNHYUNG AND GOO JUNHOE, BOTH OF YOU ARE GOING TO DIE.”

 

 


End file.
